J C B Deakin, if he is still with us and reading The Daily Telegraph, will be pleased at this morning's reports from Southampton. On our letters page on August 5 1970, he asked: "Must our finest liner, proud flagship of our merchant marine and successor of the two great Queens, always be referred to in newspapers and BBC bulletins by that hideous technological computerised post-codish term 'QE2'? Can this mode of appellation not be limited to Boeing jets, motorways and so forth?"

Cunard has taken note. Its new ship has been named, by the Queen, as Queen Elizabeth. Tricky to shorten, that. It will be a while before we learn whether she deserves her crown, but she has got off to a dignified start.

Mr Deakin's letter was in one of the dozens of envelopes of cuttings I have sifted for a Telegraph anthology of journeys by water. In another envelope, from 34 years earlier, I found a report of the first voyage of the Queen Mary. When she left her cradle on the Clyde to sail 14 miles to the sea at Greenock, she made a splash in the journalistic sense, too. Our front page of March 24 1936 records that people poured into Glasgow by train and car to gather along the river in caravans and tents. Admittedly, there weren't then the competing attractions of The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing, but the turnout was still impressive: a million and a half spectators. The Queen Mary, we declared – and this in a news story rather than an opinion piece – was "the world's finest ship".

We're not saying that today – and not just because the Queen Elizabeth was built in northern Italy rather than on the Clyde, and because Cunard is now part of the Carnival Corporation, based in Miami. Pratfall-anticipation rather than pride is the note of our journalistic times. We're waiting for faulty loos and an outbreak of legionnaires' disease. But you the readers, I know, aren't with us: for many, the sculpted red-and-black funnel of a Cunarder is still something worth cheering. Cunard says that tickets for the ship's maiden voyage sold out in half an hour; a large number will have been snapped up by Telegraph readers.

The Passenger Shipping Association says that 1.65 million Britons will take a cruise in 2010, seven per cent more than last year and more than double the figure for the year 2000. One in 10 package holidays is now a cruise, compared with one in nearly 30 in 1997, and the average age of passengers worldwide is falling every year – most first-timers are now under 40.

Why do they book? Because it's safe, it's comfortable, it's good value (the recession has prompted all sorts of offers), and it's not flying. Those Boeing "jets" that Mr Deakin mentioned would, we were told as recently as the 1960s, kill off both trains and ships. That, of course, was before global warming and 9/11; and before we rediscovered the pleasures of getting there rather than parachuting in.

More and more cruise lines are now offering what they call "no-fly" holidays from British ports. While a flight in these no-frills days is something to be endured, a cruise – even a 24-hour ferry trip from Plymouth to Santander – can still be enjoyed.

For the journalist, there's another consideration: ships and boats provide much better copy. In our files, I found stories not only about great liners on the transatlantic run but also about rustbuckets on the Amazon and coracles on the Irish Sea. My book would have been thinner, in more ways than one, if it had been about journeys by plane.

'Bon Voyage: The Telegraph Book of River and Sea Journeys', edited by Michael Kerr (Aurum Press), will be published on October 30. It can be ordered through Telegraph Books (0844 871 1514; www.books.telegraph.co.uk ) for £20 plus £1.25 postage and packing